The debt crisis spreads to Spain and Italy: will MPs vote to continue Britain's liabilities?

Should all the money we've saved at home be spent on propping up the euro?

The Government has responded to Mark Reckless's anti-bailout motionwith a wrecking amendment. Where his motion "requires" the government to halt the bailouts, theirs "urges". The Whips' motion also deletes the reference to the illegality of the bailouts – an illegality which no one in Europe seriously challenges.

If the legislature can't impose its will on the executive, what the devil is it for? The House of Commons has had one elemental function stretching back to Tudor, even Plantagenet, times: it is there to control government spending. All the other things that MPs do – the debates, the Bills, the constituency surgeries – are corollaries of that primordial duty. The idea that MPs might only beg, not instruct, ministers, drove a previous Parliament to defend its prerogatives with force of arms. Surely the current generation of MPs will not allow the executive casually to readopt the powers of the Stuart monarchs. And surely the present Speaker – who, to his enormous credit, has seen it as his task to assert the privileges of his Chamber vis-à-vis the government – will want to let MPs vote on the substantive, rather than the wrecking, motion.

Look at what's happening in the markets, for Heaven's sake. Overnight, it became clear that the debt cancer was metastasizing across the Mediterranean, with Spain and even Italy being affected. It may not be in MPs' gift to save the eurozone; but it is in their gift to save their taxpayers. To remind you, Britain has already committed £12.5 billion to propping up the euro – more than twice as much as all the savings made last year through domestic cuts. Enough is enough.